• HRT : 3/21/2017

Local Nephilim Lady | 🏳️‍⚧️She - Millicent | AuDHD and Plural | Kvetching and Fetching~
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hootOS
@hootOS

a video of me putting a rag into a picture frame. i hold the frame in the air and say, "there you go. framed rag by fuckin darius." i move my hand towards the wall, under an adventures of tweesee poster. "let's put it up on the god damn-" and the frame falls out of my hands and falls apart on the bed.

for the past ten or so years, i've been avoiding all music from a particular artist in the furry community. Because Purity and whatnot. because i was scolded numerous times into not talking about them, to stop referring to them, to stop talking at all about their music. and over the past ten years i feel like a small hole has been left in my heart because of that.

like, to be very clear, this artist is not like many other artists to me. they're the sole reason i ever made music in the first place and gained the knowledge i have now about audio production (you might've seen my posts crawling around your timeline) and my expertise in a variety of musical genres. if not for this artist, i wouldn't be as good a writer as I am now either, because i started writing lyrics for my music too. it made me realize i enjoyed writing.

if not for this artist, my remix of ANTONYMPH by Vylet Pony would not have popped off as hard as it did, because em showed me a decade earlier that music producers really were just people at the end of the day, just like me, and that i could be like them too.

so fucking fuck the noise. i want to talk positively and reminisce about a music producer who gave me the tools to make art and have fun doing it.

i wanna fangirl about Em Essex, and i only trust this platform not to throw shit at me for it.

if any of yall come for me, i do not care. i am too old for these purity tests. i will block any of you who come for me about it. eat my dick.


i started listening to Lapfox when i came across some YTPMV of like, i think it was a Kitsune² track or something. (if you remember which one, your back hurts now) and through that i eventually realized "oh shit this is a remix of an actual song that exists" and found LFT. and i listened, and okay this stuff is cool, alright, neat. didn't know there were furry musicians, this is new to me as a furry of two years.

i was like, fuckin fifteen or something. it's a blur. dissociative disorder doesn't help.

fast forward a couple years(? i think?) and i notice this artist is doing a livestream. oh shit, what's livestreaming? never heard of it. oh, it's like. a live video broadcast. that's neat, didn't know that was a thing. what are they making? it's a mashup, it's got porter robinson on it. i love it a lot. i need more of it. i await the release of Truxton's Panic Protocol. my favorite song is the one I watched them make, Hellfire Hounds Invade the Earth.

I ask what software they're using because i'm a fucking idiot and i don't know any better. the chat answers for them, it's "Sony ACID." I pirate a copy and immediately make the shittiest music ever, acting like amplitude modulation is the same as an LFO. i'm having the most fun i've ever had in my life making music out of nothing.

four halley labs cds. adventures of tweesee, prismatic, 2yr, and d.freq.crush.

RQ's ♞ comes out. it's another bop. but wait, they released other shit too? how are they doing this so fast? if i work at the rate they work at, my shit sounds REALLY bad. like, not even acceptable as demo tracks. this is nuts. i watch another livestream and holy fuck i only just noticed how fast they're working. all keyboard shortcuts, knows exactly what they want, precise mouse drags and clicks like it's fucking Counterstrike. what the fuck. ok if this person can do this, i can do this.

MEGAx5 by RQ comes out. holy shit. holy shit there are so many noises all over the place but they feel so meticulously placed. it's like a precarious stack of CDs a mile tall with a gentle breeze getting ready to roll into a gust. but it's fuckin LFT, they know what they're doing. just enough glue between each disc to keep the whole stack from falling to pieces. i start growing ears for tiny details in music that i had only felt subconsciously before.

Neverland Soundgirls comes out. i'm having a rough time in high school, i don't know anybody, i'm scared of the kids i went to elementary school with who are at this school because they're acting different towards me and it hurts a lot. they moved on, i don't know how. but it doesn't matter because this music slaps. i probably would've died if this record didn't make me think "but if i die now i can't listen to kitcaliber :("

hyi's about releases. oh this one's kinda slow. eh, i dunno, slow stuff makes me feel sad- OH OK I SEE. I NOW UNDERSTAND DYNAMICS, MISDIRECTIONS, TENSION AND RELEASE. ALRIGHT. COOL. don't think i'm ever making music this good. (she spoke of it is my favorite by far.)

caractere difficile blows my fucking mind and comes to me at the right time. i start feeling very directionless. i'm fired from my third job, i'm trying to ignore that my body is slowly falling apart, and i'm a very messy babyqueer. i'm trying to find HRT but no local doctors are competent enough to do so. "we don't prescribe off label" bullshit. but this album sweeps me off my feet with its incredible emotional depth despite its sonic simplicity compared to the rest of the releases around it. it gets me past a very difficult passage of suicidal ideation that probably could have killed me.

r is r who is r comes out. i love it. more emotional depth but where caractere difficile seemed to feel cold and isolated, this one feels different. it feels.... warm. like it's consoling me. it gets me through another rough patch. i talk to my friend Jaye over FB Messenger who refers me to a doctor who will eventually prescribe me HRT. i'm listening to source of ice while i ask her where she goes to get her scrips.

i buy Prismatic by The Queenstons. it's probably somewhere in my room piled under the mountain of clothes covering my room up to my knees. that, or i accidentally left it in my pickup truck when i wrote it off t-boning a jeep. (i wasn't found at fault because the other driver not only fled the scene, but had a warrant and also was high on meth while driving. so that's neat.)

i finally make a song worth showing off called Nightfall. i was like, idfk, 21? it's not great but like, it's got sound generation in there. it's not really a song as much as a really long loop of sounds that made me feel really good. it features just a little touch of harmony in portions that were actually kind of a mistake from copypasting that i left in because it sounded good. huh, i can call myself a producer now. i give myself the name Four is Cosmix, then change it to True North after like two months because "the X is cringe." (lol dumbass kid, your name will literally be Stryx later)

the other album i bought was Adventures With Tweesee. it's the first time i'd ever heard psytrance before. i'm obsessed with this record. if there was ever a record that could be considered a gateway drug, it's this one. genuinely considered doing acid numerous times thanks to this record. (i really wasn't in a mental state to do that properly so thank god i didn't.)

and then people get mad at me for listening to em essex's music on stream, and then they get mad at me when i talk positively about Framedrag, and then they get mad at me for talking positively about their music in general.

and for fucking years i just. stop listening. i'm a people pleaser. when people get mad at me, i cry. it takes me back to high school every time it happens.

but i'm fucking 30 now. em is a few years older than me, i think. like, we're both way, way too old for this high school drama bullshit. i am certainly way too old to avoid the artwork that literally turned me into an artist just by its own merit. and i am way, way too old for people to tell me to stop listening to a song because an imperfect human made it.

we all make fucking mistakes. i've made mistakes. she has not done wrongs that i haven't done myself when i was younger and dumber. people fuck up sometimes, that's just life. what makes you a good person or a bad person is whether you know you fucked up or not. i know i fucked up. i know em said in the past that they knew they fucked up.

there are no heroes. there certainly can be villains, sure, but no heroes. everyone is born of sin, or cover themselves in it at some point in their lives. we don't live in a comic book, this is real life. and i'm sick and tired of trying to please people who will never be happy, who want me to ignore the very real impact em's music had on my life. ignoring that is like ignoring your first child. my musicianship was a direct result of em's musicianship. i would not be an artist if i wasn't able to see the behind-the-scenes like em was doing while making hellfire hounds invade the earth. i would likely be dead without their music.

i listened to each album briefly while writing about them to try and pull memories out of my fogged up skullnoodle. when c'est difficile played, i cried. i remember weeping very, very hard about an internet friend who had passed away. that's a memory that had been locked away for over a decade. i don't remember their name, but i remember that we talked a lot and i liked their company. i wouldn't have unearthed that memory without me talking about the music that made me who i am. i wouldn't be sitting here drinking some timmy's and being amazed that i'm still alive at 30. i should be dead, but i'm not. it's another reminder to keep moving forward and keep living.

...and to keep the haters hating. fuck them, it's my life to live. not yall's.

(about five minutes after writing this all up i found a 2YR cd and a d.freq.crush cd in my bedroom. the 2YR album was a protest purchase i think, like people were getting mad at me for talking about their music so i just went and bought the latest physical release because fuck those people in particular. the d.freq.crush album though, i have absolutely no idea. i haven't the faintest clue how i came into possession of it.)


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